By ZACK HALE

As watchdogs try to assess the status of President Obama's promise to reform federal contracting, critics continue to complain that the administration has taken too long to post spending data on Recovery.gov.

Interestingly, Obama's transparency efforts dating from his time as a freshman senator seem to be faring better than the administration's newer ventures. Well before his move to the White House, Obama sponsored the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, which required a single searchable Web site to provide specific information about federal contracts, such as the amount and type of the award, and the name of its recipient. The result -- USASpending.gov -- is still the most complete federal contracting database.

In late May, the site began posting detailed data identifying grants and contracts awarded under the Recovery Act -- a move that has caused a stir among government watchdog groups, such as OMB Watch and the Sunlight Foundation.

While he applauds the breadth and level of transparency USASpending.gov provides, OMB Watch Executive Director Gary Bass questions why the Office of Management and Budget's own Web site, Recovery.gov -- which was created with the explicit purpose of tracking stimulus funds -- is lagging far behind the site Obama laid the groundwork for in 2006.

Recovery.gov provides reams of general information on various agency programs but so far has failed to provide the kind of specifics about federal contracts that USAspending.gov is already posting.

Moreover, officials from the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board have said such figures won't be available on Recovery.gov until Oct. 10, the first time the OMB is required by law to make them available.

To be fair, Recovery.gov is a brand new Web site that, given its gargantuan task, will take time to perfect, said Ed Pound, a spokesman for Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery and Transparency board.

"You can expect a massive influx of data come October," Pound said.

But Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, said the OMB is treating the October deadline as the "drop-dead" date to get the site perfect, rather than posting the data incrementally as it becomes available.

"When you get swamped with data like that it becomes much harder for the public and journalists to sort through, and you're going to get an unmanageable amount of data all at once," Allison said. "Some people will be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, but it's much better to get data in increments as opposed to all at once."

USASpending.gov makes its data publicly available via an API -- a tool used by Web developers to make sharing easy. USASpending.gov obtains its data from the Federal Data Procurement System -- a system that provides real-time data from agencies as they announce contracts.

"There should be no reason why you can't get this information from the agencies' [news] feeds," Bass said. "It exists, and taxpayers should be able to find it with ease."